The Writing Process

I find myself being asked this question multiple times during the time when my updates are extremely slow and non-existent. How exactly do I get myself focused on writing another emotionally capturing and intense chapter?

This question always gets to me. I mean character development and plot come easily to me, especially as I find myself imagining a certain scene in my head. Everything starts to flow really nicely. But the process itself, before I even get to the imagining, is quite long and frustrating. My latest story deals with mature subject matter, which isn't all happy and full of high school comedy. 

It's raw, intense, at times evil, and downright gritty. Violence and hurt are key emotions and feelings that my characters experience and it's not something easy to write if one does not see these things on a daily basis.

The first answer to this question is music. 

Yeah yeah, I know everyone probably gives this generic answer, but music is a true inspiration to many great writers out there. Sometimes it's the artists' words and sometimes is the haunting melody that really gets inside your veins that you quickly find yourself needing to get the idea out of your system. 

Most of my music on my iPhone is depressing, sad, and downright gloomy. That isn't because I am some depressed individual who escapes into the world of darkness to relieve her pain. No, the music is largely based on the emotions I need to feel to write scenes that I otherwise cannot. 

I am a generally happy person. I read, I crack jokes all the time, I am happy, sad and always all over the place. I am not depressed and I don't lack any love from my family. The idea of the dark story came up to me back in 2005 when I watched a movie about human trafficking. 

Still a freshly new immigrant in Canada, I struggled to understand the language that was still so foreign to me. With great difficulty, I managed to sit down and understand the brutality of the subject and it got to me, so deep the subject still haunts me today. In High School, I advocated the topic and things just went down from there. 

There was something in me, something that was bursting and itching its way through my skin, begging to be let out. At first it was just a small one shot of a woman who is kidnapped. Then it involved a young man trying to save her, and then slowly it was a villain who turned her life around.  

The story kept changing, the characters began seeing other lights, and I began to mature along with my own ideas. And it was all through music that I began to feel everything my characters felt and experienced. I forced myself into darkness and pain so I could write and feel the hurt they did. 

I know it's sounds quite sad and sacrificial on my part—to put myself in such a situation—but it helped me a lot. It helped capture emotions I couldn't even come to understand if it weren't for Damien Rice and Chopin. Pain doesn't have to be something physical to be understood, for me the emotional part that came with it was worse than any beating I could get. 

My second answer to the question would probably be the public. yeah, people. 

I know it's sounds strange, but the only reason I even had the guts to sit down and write something was because I watched others did the same. I was in love with Inuyasha when I was 12 and started reading fan fiction at that time. I encountered and read many stories that gripped my imagination and expanded it to a point that I could see myself creating something as well. 

It continued to Twilight a couple of years later when I physically saw young amateur writers who I had the pleasure of talking to on fan fiction get published right before my eyes. It was truly an inspiring sight and writing almost became easy then. If it weren't for fan fiction, I'd probably never have the guts to sit down and write on paper, let alone post it on a site where millions have access. 

Music and aspiring writers were and still are a true aspiration to my writing process and I will forever be grateful to them for this chance to write a story of my own.